Friday news gathered by GenevaLunch from sources around the world

  • Scotland Yard and the British government have confirmed that a memory stick has disappeared in a major data security breach: it contained records of 33,000 serious offenders, 10,000 "priority criminals" and for all prisoners in England and Wales their names with dates of birth, according to the Times, UK
  • Barack Obama is expected to announce his running mate in the US presidential race Saturday at a rally in Springfield, Illinois, and with a text message at the same time. CNN
  • Members of Awakening, a Sunni group of "former insurgents," are being arrested by the mainly Shiite government in Iraq, a concern to the United States government which has been paying many of the Sunni former fighters as citizen patrols. They "have been a major pillar in the decline in violence around the nation," writes the New York Times.
  • Only 39 bodies had been identified by mid-afternoon Thursday as relatives began the difficult task of identifying victims from the Madrid air crash that killed 153 people Wednesday. The Spanish government says about half of the passengers lived in the Canary Islands, where the plane was headed. AFP
  • The IOC (International Olympics Committee) is asking the international gymnastics federation to investigate the age of gymnastics gold medal winner He Kexin to ensure she is of age: an athlete must be 16 during the year in which Games are held. BBC
  • A stillborn baby in Jerusalem was discovered to be alive after spending several hours in a hospital cooler. The baby girl, born at only 23 weeks into her mother’s pregnancy, was then rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit. Reuters
  • Small clusters of blogger-activists with free Tibet flags, mostly Americans, have been detained by Chinese authorities in Beijing as the Olympics run into their final days. Reuters
Posted by Ellen Wallace on 22 August 2008 at 7:18 | permalink
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News story, GenevaLunch, 22 August 2008.

Filed under: World news

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